Sunday, April 19, 2009

Build: Arbor Project

For a while now I've been working with the Arbor Project in Second Life.

The Arbor Project is a community that arose to champion the cause of a more beautiful Mainland. This was mostly in reaction to the activities of a few unscrupulous land dealers who cut up the land into little tiny chunks and put extortion builds in them.

The Arbor Project has been taking donations of this 'junk land' for quite a while, and has quite a bit. Neighbors who want the land can claim it and join it to their existing land.

A few months back there was a call for volunteers to 'landscape' the larger parcels, and make them nice. I jumped on that. :-)

Here are a few of the builds I made:

The first was in Weinlos sim. It doesn't exist anymore; someone claimed it. Since it bordered Route 8, it consisted of a nice old-timey billboard and a 'prim' station. The station features a gravity-fed pump and rotating prims floating inside.

This is a low-prim build, and took about 5 hours spread over two days. I used mostly textures from the Bay City content pack, and from Torley's textures. The Primoco texture I made myself. And the ad is, shall we say, 'fair use,' because I'm using it ironically; this is, after all, recovered ad farm.

Here's a build I did in Porcupine sim with Nostrum Forder. It's a little zen garden nestled within 128 square meters. My original idea was to echo the shapes of the objects in the nearby microparcels within the sand garden part, thus drawing them into the zen garden. But Nostrum started putting down rocks, which looked a lot less like a junkyard and more like a proper zen garden.

This garden still exists. It was claimed by a friend, Silverr Andel, who left it mostly in place, with only minor changes.